Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Lucy Burns was chained by her hands to the cell bars above her head, where she hung for the rest of the night barely able to breathe.

Dora Lewis was thrown into a dark cell and then knocked out cold when her jailers smashed her head against an iron bed.

Other women were dragged, beaten, choked, pinched, twisted and kicked by their jailers.

These women were imprisoned for 60 days by order of the District of Columbia courts and were subjected to unsanitary prison conditions and worm-infested food. Drinking water was a privilege bestowed only on those who were subservient to their masters.

Who were the prisoners? They were women protesters whose organizations petitioned President Woodrow Wilson to support them in pushing for the vote for women. When he did not act on their behalf, they picketed the White House.

Who were the jailers? Acting under the authority of both local and federal government officials in Washington D. C. on November 15, 1917, these “jailers” were all white American males, many dressed in business suits, some wearing hats.

This was the Night of Terror for women suffragists in the United States of America.

Women who lawfully picketed the White House politely demanding the right to vote were arrested and jailed. Their civil rights as citizens were violated in our democratic society where concepts of individual liberties are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and subject to the due process of law….to everyone except females in 1917.

Forty prison guards rampaged throughout the night of November 15, 1917 wielding clubs with their warden’s blessing against 33 women protesters.

The United States had chosen to “handle” these protesters by arresting them for obstructing sidewalk traffic. When the warden ordered his guards to teach those girls a lesson because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote, word finally leaked out to the press. Newspaper readers were horrified at the tales being told by observers.

The leader of these brave and determined women, Alice Paul, was a Quaker whose religion taught equality of the sexes. She was arrested and jailed, refused to eat, was tied to a chair, then force fed with a tube jabbed down into her throat until she bled profusely from her nose and mouth.

Paul organized the Silent Sentinels, a group of women who rotated their time to quietly stand at the White House gates with signs meant to challenge or embarrass Wilson. These women knew they were second-class citizens in their country of birth, yet fervently believed in their status as human beings who were entitled to equal standing with males, rights that were guaranteed by the Constitution.

Wilson tried to get control of Alice Paul by calling in legal and medical minds, all male of course, to discuss how they could permanently institutionalize Paul by declaring her insane. One psychiatrist present offered his daring belief that “Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.”

The interesting side of this story is that there were actually women psychiatrists in America at that time but more was known about the many women who were institutionalized for mental problems than about the few women practicing medicine. Mental problems were a safe diagnosis for those women whose families wanted to be rid of them.

U.S. Senator Tom Leighton was so distraught about his wife’s participation in the suffrage movement that he took away her allowance (remember that women could not own property and relied on the men in their lives for financial support). When she was arrested, he took their two daughters to his mother because his wife was “unfit.”

After she was sent to the workhouse with other suffragists, he found and read her diary. When he read her heart felt statement that American women are not free whether in prison or out, he was stunned. Calling on his wife in prison, she slipped him a note about the abuses….and this is how the press finally became aware of how American officials were treating American women.

The National Women’s History Project says “American suffragists played a major role in writing women back into history” after we had been omitted or erased from the public record until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Without knowing our history, we can never achieve what we are capable of achieving in this world.

For more about women’s history in the United States as collated by this worthwhile organization, go to nwhp@nwhp.org

For more about the suffragists and how far we have come since 1920, see my video by going to www.juliahughesjones.com and clicking on Julia’s video. You will note that the background music is Beethoven’s Ninth. It is a fitting choice because this innovative symphony, the first with a vocal score, has themes of equality and redemption linked to the common quest for freedom in politics, art, and particularly freedom of the mind and spirit.

What else did the suffragettes and suffragists ask for more than freedom to interact as citizens of their countries?

Even more revealing are the synonyms for defective:
imperfect, incomplete, inadequate.

A new book recently published by Grace Walker, whose in-depth research included traveling to the Holy Land, reveals how the Catholic Church as an organized movement set out to denigrate all females past and future as "defective males."

As Walker writes, the reinvention of Mary Magdalene by Pope Gregory the Great "marked the beginning of a disturbing pattern of behavior that would contaminate the church and mutate and grow into the very fabric of the church for thousands of years."

Put in a different way, when Pope Gregory proclaimed Mary Magdalene a harlot redeemed by Christ about 1400 years ago, he set into motion a movement to keep women out of leadership, both in the church and in the world.

Walker's book, Women are Defective Males: The Calculated Denigration of Women by the Catholic Church and Its Disastrous Consequences Today, is written from the perspective of a Catholic convert educated in theology who loves her church.

The author happened to be a Methodist (as was I) who married a Catholic and then converted to Catholicism (as did I). So intent was she to learn about her new religion that she went back to school and earned a Master of Arts in Theology. Her church grabbed her immediately and capitalized on her dedication and skills by putting her to work in the church. As Director of Development for her Catholic parish she established new ministries and fellowship programs in her church.

Walker's superlative credentials give her a sturdy platform to write a book about her chosen church and what she has learned from its history.
According to Walker, Catholic seminaries today are teaching the "old school" catechism (including misogyny), and Mary Magdalene is once again being revealed as the most famous harlot in world art and Christian history. In the late 1960s Rome backed off that invented charge because there is no proof the Magdalene is a repentant prostitute as Pope Gregory professed. Now the charge is back.

When younger Catholics today are shocked, offended, and argumentative to learn that Jesus was Jewish, as Walker reports, it is visible proof that Rome does not insist on biblical studies. Keep in mind that Catholic dogma supersedes the bible in the eyes of the Catholic hierarchy.

As for women being defective men, Walker knows from her biblical studies and first hand interviews and research in the Holy Land that Jesus was "a Galilean Jew who preached equality for all: men, women, and children. His treatment of women particularly was considered radical and revolutionary for his time," she says.

Radical and revolutionary? Jesus knew that male and female are equal as created by God. It was those who argue against that truth who are the radicals and revolutionaries.

A Florida resident, the author has dedicated a portion of the book proceeds to support services for the homeless and for survivors of sexual abuse by priests.

As a postscript to this blog, my copy of Grace Walkers Women Are Defective Men came by way of a Catholic survivor of sexual abuse by her priest. I am purchasing this book to send to friends who are now fallen away Catholics, like me.

(Let me assure the reader that all Catholics, whether parishioners or priests,cannot be grouped into the false-theology/sexual abuse/misogyny sect of this mighty organization.)